Fitbit Introduces New ‘Mass Market Smartwatch’ Called The Fitbit Versa

Trending News: Fitbit Wants To Sell You A Premium Smartwatch At A Budget Value

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Long Story Short

The wearable giant expands its fitness smartwatch collection with a newer model that offers more advanced features and a lighter design at an accessible price.

Long Story

Wearables are hitting store shelves just as fast as smartphones. If it’s not a new fitness tracker, then it’s a new smartwatch being introduced every quarter. And the one tech company that’s constantly making its presence felt in both product categories is Fitbit.

Just last summer the company made waves after officially releasing its Apple Watch competitor, the Fitbit Ionic. Despite positive reviews, Fitbit admitted its flagship device wasn’t meeting the “aggressive goals” the company set, forcing them to rethink their direction heading into the next product launch cycle.

Fitbit's now set their goal on capturing a greater share of the wearables market. In doing so, they're taking a step back from their costly approach to premium hardware and targeting a “mass appeal” demographic, delivering us a future-ready smartwatch that everyone can afford called the Fitbit Versa.

Lighter, smarter, and cheaper (in price that is) – the Fitbit Versa is the brand’s most compelling wearable to date, boasting a more advanced fitness ecosystem and practically all the selling points of the Ionic.

Like its older, high-priced sibling, the device features 24/7 heart rate monitoring, onscreen workouts, mobile payments, sleep tracking, media storage (300+ songs), and 4+ days of battery life. However, it's the newer software updates that make the Versa an attractive and feasible investment.

For starters, the watch launches with the latest operating system (OS 2.0), which displays a new personalized dashboard to view advanced health and fitness data directly on the screen. This eliminates the hassle of going into the Fitbit app on your smartphone to check out biometrics. Another cool feature is Quick Replies for Android users (coming soon to iOS), allowing them to send customizable responses to text messages and messenger apps.

Fitbit

Granted the Fitbit Versa is a gender-neutral wearable, the company did design the product with women in mind, even integrating what it calls female health tracking to aid them with monitoring their menstrual cycle. This was integrated for the sole purposes of giving women a better understanding of “connections between their period, estimated fertile window, and overall health.” Talk about some groundbreaking stuff right there, especially if the results are accurate.

Fitbit does plan on making all these new software features available to Ionic users as well via OS update, so those who own the luxury model won't feel so left out. Though there's still no word if any other Fitbit devices will support these features in the near future.

Design-wise, the Fitbit Versa is advertised as the “lightest metal smartwatch in the US.” This is something we can attest to from our brief hands-on with the device, as the ultra-thin, anodized aluminum case sits super-comfortably on the wrist and doesn’t weight it down. It's almost as like as the Alta Hr and Charge 2 HR activity trackers. The Versa comes waterproof and has a variety of stylish bands available to accommodate all lifestyles too.

It turns out the Versa isn't the only new addition to the Fitbit family. The company has also announced its first-ever kid-friendly wearable dubbed the Fitbit Ace, which borrows design cues from the Alta line and offers some of the same active features to encourage 8 year olds (and up) to stay fit, while keeping them connected to their parents via privacy controls. This includes mobile notifications and limiting what stats they see in the Fitbit app.

The Fitbit Versa smartwatch is available for pre-order now at Fitbit.com for $199.95 and is scheduled for release in April 2018, whereas the Fitbit Ace is on pre-order for $99.95 and hits stores in Q2 2018.

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Currently, Fitbit has over 25 million active users with Fitbit groups having been created and joined over 4.7 million times.

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